Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Have you ever wanted to learn a language or pick up an instrument, only to become too daunted by the task at hand? Expert performance guru Anders Ericsson has made a career of studying chess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes, and memory mavens. Peak condenses three decades of original research to introduce an incredibly powerful approach to learning that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring a skill.

One of the most popular Fortune articles in many years was a cover story called "What It Takes to Be Great." Geoff Colvin offered new evidence that top performers in any field - from Tiger Woods and Winston Churchill to Warren Buffett and Jack Welch - are not determined by their inborn talents. Greatness doesn't come from DNA but from practice and perseverance honed over decades.

10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found a Self-Help That Actually Works

After having a nationally televised panic attack on Good Morning America, Dan Harris knew he had to make some changes. A lifelong nonbeliever, he found himself on a bizarre adventure, involving a disgraced pastor, a mysterious self-help guru, and a gaggle of brain scientists.

The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

The Art of Learning takes listeners through Waitzkin's unique journey to excellence. He explains in clear detail how a well-thought-out, principled approach to learning is what separates success from failure. Waitzkin believes that achievement, even at the championship level, is a function of a lifestyle that fuels a creative, resilient growth process.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Ben Horowitz offers essential advice on building and running a startup - practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz’s personal and often humbling experiences.

Sell or Be Sold: How to Get Your Way in Business and in Life

Whether it's selling your company's product in the boardroom or selling yourself on eating healthy, everything in life can and should be treated as a sale. And as sales expert Grant Cardone explains, knowing the principles of selling is a prerequisite for success of any kind. In Sell or Be Sold, Cardone breaks down the techniques and approaches necessary to master the art of selling in any avenue.

No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline for Success in Your Life

Most people think success comes from good luck or enormous talent, but many successful people achieve their accomplishments in a simpler way: through self-discipline. Brian Tracy knows this firsthand. He didn’t graduate from high school, and after working for a few years as a laborer, he realized he had limited skills and a limited future. But through the power of self-discipline, he changed his life.

The Happiness Project

Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany one rainy afternoon in the unlikeliest of places: a city bus. "The days are long, but the years are short," she realized. "Time is passing, and I'm not focusing enough on the things that really matter." In that moment, she decided to dedicate a year to her happiness project.

Thinking Like an Economist: A Guide to Rational Decision Making

Economic forces are everywhere around you. But that doesn't mean you need to passively accept whatever outcome those forces might press upon you. Instead, with these 12 fast-moving and crystal clear lectures, you can learn how to use a small handful of basic nuts-and-bolts principles to turn those same forces to your own advantage.

Understanding the Mysteries of Human Behavior

Every day of your life is spent surrounded by mysteries that involve what appear to be rather ordinary human behaviors. What makes you happy? Where did your personality come from? Why do you have trouble controlling certain behaviors? Why do you behave differently as an adult than you did as an adolescent?Since the start of recorded history, and probably even before, people have been interested in answering questions about why we behave the way we do.

Choose Yourself!: Be Happy, Make Millions, Live the Dream

The world is changing. Markets have crashed. Jobs have disappeared. Industries have been disrupted and are being remade before our eyes. Everything we aspired to for "security," everything we thought was "safe," no longer is. But more and more opportunities are rising out of the ashes of the broken system to generate real success. Choose Yourself illuminates your personal path to building a bright, new world out of the wreckage of the old.

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact. Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how - by saying less and asking more - you can develop coaching methods that produce great results.

The Power of Broke: How Empty Pockets, a Tight Budget, and a Hunger for Success Can Become Your Greatest Competitive Advantage

Here, the FUBU founder and star of ABC's Shark Tank shows that, far from being a liability, broke can actually be your greatest competitive advantage as an entrepreneur. Why? Because starting a business from broke forces you to think more creatively. It forces you to use your resources more efficiently. It forces you to connect with your customers more authentically and market your ideas more imaginatively.

You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself

You Are Now Less Dumb is grounded in the idea that we all believe ourselves to be objective observers of reality - except we’re not. But that's okay, because our delusions keep us sane. Expanding on this premise, McRaney provides eye-opening analyses of 15 more ways we fool ourselves every day. This smart and highly entertaining audiobook will be wowing listeners for years to come.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. His starting point is moral intuition - the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right.

13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time

Science starts to get interesting when things don't make sense. Science's best-kept secret is that there are experimental results and reliable data that the most brilliant scientists can neither explain nor dismiss. If history is any precedent, we should look to today's inexplicable results to forecast the future of science. Michael Brooks heads to the scientific frontier to meet 13 modern-day anomalies and discover tomorrow's breakthroughs.

The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss

In this highly listenable and provocative book, Dr. Jason Fung sets out an original, robust theory of obesity that provides startling insights into proper nutrition. In addition to his five basic steps - a set of lifelong habits that will improve your health and control your insulin levels - Dr. Fung explains how to use intermittent fasting to break the cycle of insulin resistance and reach a healthy weight - for good.

The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase

In his inimitably entertaining and wonderfully witty style, he takes apart famous phrases and shows how you too can write like Shakespeare or quip like Oscar Wilde. Whether you’re aiming to achieve literary immortality or just hoping to deliver the perfect one-liner, The Elements of Eloquence proves that you don’t need to have anything important to say - you simply need to say it well.

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crises

In 1971, President Nixon imposed national price controls and took the United States off the gold standard, an extreme measure intended to end an ongoing currency war that had destroyed faith in the U.S. dollar. Today we are engaged in a new currency war, and this time the consequences will be far worse than those that confronted Nixon. Currency wars are one of the most destructive and feared outcomes in international economics.

The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

The Etymologicon is a completely unauthorized guide to the strange underpinnings of the English language. It explains: How you get from “gruntled” to “disgruntled”; why you are absolutely right to believe that your meager salary barely covers “money for salt”; how the biggest chain of coffee shops in the world (hint: Seattle) connects to whaling in Nantucket; and what precisely the Rolling Stones have to do with gardening.

Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons From a Small-Town Obituary Writer

As she was digging deep into the lives of community members, Heather Lende, the obituary writer for her tiny hometown newspaper in Haines, Alaska, began to notice something. Even the crustiest old Alaskan sourpuss who died in a one-room cabin always had Halloween candy for the neighborhood kids, and the eccentric owner of the seafood store who regularly warned her about government conspiracies knew how to be a true friend - his memorial service was packed.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a superpower in our increasingly competitive 21st-century economy.

Love and Respect: The Love She Most Desires; the Respect He Desperately Needs

A wife has one driving need: to feel loved. When that need is met, she is happy. A husband has one driving need: to feel respected. When that need is met, he is happy. When either of these needs isn't met, things get crazy. Love and Respect reveals why spouses react negatively to each other and how they can deal with such conflict quickly, easily, and biblically.

The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy

Chris Bailey turned down lucrative job offers to pursue a lifelong dream - to spend a year performing a deep dive experiment into the pursuit of productivity, a subject he had been enamored with since he was a teenager. After obtaining his business degree, he created a blog to chronicle a year-long series of productivity experiments he conducted on himself, where he also continued his research and interviews with some of the world's foremost experts, from Charles Duhigg to David Allen.

Publisher's Summary

Just as we were getting used to the Information Age, Daniel Pink tells us that it is ending. With it goes our focus on charts, statistics, and linear thinking. Traditional "left-brain" activities, like logic, analysis, and repetitive production, are being turned over to robots, computers, and offshore labor. The valued skills of the 21st Century will be those of the right brain: empathy, design, synthesis, and contextual thinking. In this live presentation, author and lecturer Daniel Pink tells you:

Read the book about a year ago and decided to listen to this talk instead of listening to the whole book again. It's a great talk and makes the same arguments as in the book in a succint way. Great complement to the book and very funny too, which makes it easier to listen and remember.

This speech was full of energy, makes it's points and funny. I laughed and learned about the authors philosophy. I was shocked that it kept my attention (difficult to do). Typically I have to pay close attention and really focus on not tuning out. This speech was easy to pay attention to. I was disappointed when it was over.

I had heard a lot about 'A whole new mind' by Daniel Pink. I avoided buying this one for a while as it was quite short and obviously not the complete book. I finally gave in and I am so glad I did. It is not only enlightening but it is also very amusing and motivational. I have listened to it several times which is quite unusual for me. I do hope Daniel Pink records the complete 'A whole new mind'

It's a live motivational speech complete with slideshows and graphs you can't see while the speaker is demonstrating his point. You can get the jist of where he's going and I suppose that's good enough.

Did the narration match the pace of the story?

I could feel his excitement and it was easy enough to get caught up until you realize it's all hype.

Any additional comments?

I work in the creative industry and just because my skill set is necessary to differentiate one product from another, doesn't mean the corporate system will see the value in it and/or not try to convince the artist that this project is just stepping stone and should be done cheap/free.

It's a nice thought, just not doesn't fit with common business practices.

This is an excellent, interesting, engaging presentation of the trends shaping our future markets. Great content is also very well presented and keeps the listener's attention with a great pace, humor, well presented material. Unfortunately, the speaker makes many points where he is clearly displaying visual presentations key to his point. There is no PDF download for this audible so several of his points are missing key visual information (Charts, pictures of his self portraits, etc...). It is still well worth listening too, but would be better (complete) if the listener could see the presentations referred to by the speaker.

Lacks depth. Is not reflecting current scientific workings of left brain/right brain.

Which character – as performed by Daniel Pink – was your favorite?

He is a good speaker but comes across with confidence that is very close to arrogance. In Q&A he has bad speaking habits. Annoyingly, repeating "okay?" As he drones on without taking a breath.

Was A Whole New Mind (Live) worth the listening time?

It was okay while drinking morning coffee, folding laundry... But even then started to seem too long, going nowhere fast.

Any additional comments?

My lack of praise may be largely due to the dated material. However, I have no desire to listen to a newer book by this author. And begs the question, why release this lecture so long after the book it was modeled upon?